Philosophy is like sex: sure you can get some interesting results, but that's not why we do it. Going one step beyond…why do you FEEL pain or pleasure? Do plants have emotions? How is possible that some people do not understand other’s emotions? Emotions seem to be everywhere, giving meaning to all events of our lives. They are the backbone of social activities as well as they drive the cognitive processes of several living entities. Several animals, including humans, have emotions but…what about machines?...Do machine can have emotions?
This course will help you to understand and to identify most important philosophical ideas and debates about emotions, as well as it will provide you a rich source of data about neurological, psychological or anthropological analysis of emotions.
In a nutshell: this is a course to feel and think about.

BS

IL

Jul 26, 2017

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Lots of very interesting topics, I highly recommend it! :-)

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Where do emotions come from?

At the very beginning of this course we will look at the basic definitions and concepts related to the emotional events. At the same time we will introduce basic philosophical ideas in order to make possible the understanding of the nature of emotional values.

Преподаватели

Jordi Vallverdú

Professor Dr.

Текст видео

[MUSIC] Hi. Welcome to the fourth intst, interactionary media of this sections. In this section we will try to understand how did emotion evolve. And who was the first person to, to think about this process? It was Charles Darwin in 1872 and he wrote a very interesting book called Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In which he tried to understand why, not only why man and animals have emotions, but also why they express them. It's a very important aspect of this event, of the nature of this event. So, from his studies and other guys since then. We know that emotions are useful for serving various purposes but at the same time, we know that they're very useful for social aspects of living interaction. First of all, they are innate. They are hard wired. Most of them, we can choose to feel comfortable or uncomfortable with playing inputs that affect our receptors in our body. Although we can train our body in order to react in some way or another one, to this input. But, anyhow emotions make possible the, the design of, of strong social aspects that explain why humans and other social animals live together. Initially, for example, the care of the off, offspring, also their, their creation of, of long-term, long-term sexual bonds that are again, useful for care of the offspring. The, the, the extent of the compassion among the relatives or among the members of a group. It's one of the basics of, of several regions. For example the universal compassion among Budd, Buddhist thinkers and practitioners. And also, for example, the, the modulator. Modulating of social hierarchies. And, and finally, the, the existence of sensorimotor and emotional processes by empathy that are based, as you remember, on, on neural processes that happens into the, into our heads. So, emotions are useful for several things. From a survival per, perspective, we can find two big groups, negative emotions that create defenseful activities. And also, and at the other side, on the other side, positive emotions that make possible to reinforce actions that are positive for that being. Then, when we think, how did emotions evolve? There is a, a, a, a moment in which emotions happen, just an, a natural, like a natural or biological level that it was before the, the, the beginning of the social interaction. And, and even before of, of the symbolic moment in which our ancestors became the sapiens more or less 100,000 ago years ago. And we, we found, we find now that emotions are modes, modes of functioning, shaped by natural selection. And, and they involve physio, physiological, cognitive, motivational, behavioral and subjective responses to things that have happened to us. Which is a mechanism that allow, allow social emotions. There, it's very simple. It's the existence of, of special neurons called mirror neurons that are localized into the F5 brain area, the anterior intraparietal area. And there are made possible, the sensorimotor mimicry that it's necessary for a being in order to understand what is happening in that entity. And it make possible that we make predictions about what will happen if we see somebody that it's, it's working toward us. We can calculate how long we'll take him or her to arrive until us and then to prepare reactions to this process. And also, this mirror neuron system make possible the creation of internal states. In which we can feel sad, because we see somebody that is feeling something negative. This is the reason by which we go to the cinema, to feel what are feeling another guys. We call this process empathy. At the same time we can find that beyond all, all the biological constraints that really shape the emotional event. We have different ways, cultural ways, of deal with emotions, and, and a similar, a second point, emotions are far from really diet responses from their, from the environment. It, they are processed inside the brain with more cultural information that make possible to understand the situation in a very different perspective according to your cultural background. And even exists some emotional state in which there are not possible translations or only belong to a, to a specific culture in the world. For example, and, and we can obtain these evidences for, from ethnographic works in which exist exist untranslatable emotions. Like amae in Japan, the, the necessity for indulgent dependencies. It's a very, very complex to describe briefly. Or the saudade in Portugal, the, the feeling of, of, of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost. Or the schadenfreude in Germany. It's the pleasure de, de, derived by seeing another's misfortune. Or litost in, in in Czech language, or toska in Russian. There are culturally specific ways to understand internal state, and consequently, they are dark. And they are conceptualized in a different specific way, so, trying to put in order all the previous ideas, we can understand emotions like evolutionary strategy. They are, at the same time, shared among humans allowing social actions. They are more obviously more living entities that are social and that, that are not human. And also the, the notion of empathy as a v, very important neural mechanism that makes possible that, that important aspect of the sensorimotor imitation. But not also sensorimotor but also emotional interaction and understanding that makes possible the, the the emergence of attitude of actions of intentionality. And to recognize recognizing process of these actions in in other beings. And finally, we can understand the cultural forces like very important ways of shaping and creating emotional dynamics. And meanings for the empathies that are under that cultural environment. Thank you so much. I hope to see you in the next video.